Historic Salem building receiving repairs, restoration

Salem’s nineteenth-century Custom House is getting a late-summer makeover.

Kristin D'Agostino

Salem’s nineteenth-century Custom House is getting a late-summer makeover.

Astute passers-by might have noticed the building’s majestic columns disappearing off the front entryway one by one in recent weeks. About half of the eight wooden columns — which are combination of Ionic and Corinthian design — are being repaired due to rot caused by insects and water damage.

Additional parts of the building are being restored, including smaller columns on the portico above the front door, and decorative rosette and leaf embellishments fashioned by architect Samuel McIntire nephew, carpenter Joseph McIntire Jr.

The rot, according to Steve Abbott, a National Park Service historical preservationist, is due largely to an infestation of carpenter ants. The building’s close proximity to the Salem Harbor makes it particularly vulnerable the elements. Wet wood, Abbott says, attracts insects like the carpenter ants that ate their way up into the columns, leaving gaping holes inside.

Abbott emphasized that the building itself is still structurally sound and that the damaged columns pose more of an aesthetic problem than a structural one. The building will remain open to visitors, who will use the side entrance.

Abbott admits, however, that restoring the columns has by far been the largest project he’s tackled in his 10 years with the park service. Bigger even than a few years back when the Custom House boiler broke down in the middle of winter and much of the paint on building’s walls and ceiling had to be redone due to damage from the cold.

“This has been more challenging because you have to build a whole pillar,” says Abbott, pointing out that though replacing it would be much easier, it would go against the park service’s mission to protect the building’s “historic fabric.”

To restore the pieces, first the 200-pound columns must be hoisted out from under the passageway roof and metal support rods put into place. The yellow pine pillars — which are about 14 feet high and a foot around — are taken into the woodshop next door where the rotten parts are sawed off and replaced with more durable woods such as Spanish cedar or fir.

The most delicate work involves replicating details on the heads of the columns, curvy filigreed pieces with work that was all meticulously hand carved. Here, the carpenters must remove rotted portions and replace them with epoxy which they shape by hand to fit the original contours of the piece.

Layers of white paint are stripped off and the entire finished piece treated with a wood hardener that helps protect it from the elements. To reproduce another Federal style detail, the workers use a router machine to carve long “flutes” into the columns. In total each column requires about 80 hours of work.

Abbott estimates it will take him and his colleague through the winter to finish the columns, after which the two men will continue to repair other areas of the building.

In addition to the Custom House, the National Park Service tends to sites in Saugus and six other Salem buildings including the late 18th-century Hawkes House on Derby Street and the seventeenth-century Narbonne House on Essex Street.

Repair, Abbott says, is nothing new for the 19th-century Custom House, which sees multitudes of tourists each day.

“It cracks and we just repair it …” he says. “That’s what we’re here for, to preserve and to protect.”

History of Salem’s Custom House

According to the “A Guide to Four Centuries of Design,” a publication by the National Park Service:

Built by the U.S. Customs Service in 1819, the Federal-style Custom House served as a governmental office building form 1819 to 1937. The building was in the most fashionable style of the period, featuring a flight of granite steps leading to the formal entrance on the second floor of the building. The Custom House was designed to show that the federal government could build the type of monumental architecture that merchants and captains were used to seeing in Europe, and was a visual reminder of the strength and stability of the federal government.

The author Nathaniel Hawthorne worked at the Custom House from 1847 to 1849. During the latter part of the nineteenth century Salem’s maritime trade experienced a drastic change.

National Park Service historian Emily Murphy tells the Gazette, “People working at the Custom House who were in their 80s witnessed a change from exotic trading port into industrial port.” During this time, Murphy says, trade switched from a boom on incoming goods like tea, coffee and spices to greater emphasis on industrial exports such as raw cotton and hides.

Today, the Custom House is administered by the National Park Service and is open daily.

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